Alex Baldwin

“Can You Draw More Sheep for Ammon to Protect?”

The woman I love has a family that goes to
church. In Utah. To my left, in the same pew, a small child lays out an
array of crayons across her mother’s lap and flips open a book. The
coloring book gives Ammon a sword, the robbers clubs, and the sheep a
streamy meadow in the foreground of snow-capped triangles. It’s the
scene right before the story, which the picture leaves for the parents
to tell: Ammon slices off the arms of the sheep-robbers to then dump
them, the arms, in a pile at the foot of the king as proof of his value
as a servant. Why would a coloring book ask a child to draw more sheep
into this story? Into this need to be protected? Who wants to be born
into such a scene? Into such a need? But when the girl finishes making
Ammon’s legs green, his war skirt black and orange, his sword yellow,
she looks up at me bored, so I hear myself say draw more sheep. As she
does I think about the woman to my right, the woman I love, the woman
who doesn’t seem to mind how sweaty our hands become clasped together
through the service, and what she said earlier on the freeway: I want a
baby. It’s the scene before the story. There was a billboard for plastic
surgery, for laser-hair removal; I felt like a sheep in need of
protection. I pictured her pregnant as a bag of severed arms. The woman
I love wants to have a baby; I feel like a king.

ALEX BALDWIN alternates between teaching
college writing and backpacking in the inter-mountain West. He holds an
MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Idaho. This is his
first published poem.